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> a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too Why? The way to learn a lot of prior knowledge is focused study and good teaching. Philosophy has li

> a large philosophical paradigm shift might be needed too Why? The way to learn a lot of prior knowledge is focused study and good teaching. Philosophy has little to do with it. I agree that it would make sense having more specialized lab workers (which definitely is a trade and should be learned while doing like one) assisting scientists whose education must be broader. Another thing concerning the philosophy is that the current environment and competition for resources at research institutions rather discourages good scientific practice. E.g., it encourages overselling results while never attempting to reproduce them. This is getting better in my opinion, as e.g. in the open science initiative. However, I find it very hard to agrue that teaching more philosophy of science would do much good here. It's a problem of incentives. Another question is whether science would actually progress faster (or in some other way better) if the philosophical ideals were followed more closely. I don't see how the situation in bio labs that you describe would benefit from all PhD students having heared three lectures on philosophy of science. The occasions where the philosophy actually informs decisions in the lab are very rare (though sometimes very important) and there seem to be enough people who know these things well enough for their purposes when this knowledge benefits the lab. When leaving academia, few students will have a chance to apply these concepts and most at least know that scientific methodology is a thing and will learn it if actually needed for what they do. Furthermore, most fields have their own somewhat incompatible folklore methodologies that do not easily generalize to unrelated problems.

caddemon 4y ago
No as fields get deeper and deeper there is a point at which it is no longer humanly possible to cover the prior material exhaustively in a vaguely reasonable timeframe. We can keep digging narrower and narrower niches at the expense of basic scientific literacy, or we can realize that at some point the system cannot keep scaling in a one dimensional way. Or I guess we can make people go to school until they're 60. If you think what I'm proposing is three lectures on philosophy of science than either you have zero idea how a PhD program works or you're arguing in bad faith. The fact that someone can graduate from a top 5 biology PhD program without ever demonstrating the ability to come up with a decent research question nor to independently plan a decent study to address a given research question is appalling. The fact the programs actively discourage students from exploring anything intellectual outside of the narrow framework of their chosen lab, even projects that would clearly fit under the program's broader umbrella, is also appalling. The primary point isn't whether students can learn those things on their own later. The primary point is that this is a huge indictment of the culture of graduate training. It is creating a legion of fucking drones as our next set of profs. Many of them are truly not aware that they lack this expertise. Also, a PhD is explicitly designed as training to be in academia. There are a small set of industry jobs that require a PhD, and there are more industry jobs that appreciate a PhD, but really the only reason that PhDs have shifted so much towards industry is because the academic job market is completely fucked. It is only recently that biology professors will entertain the idea that someone should choose to leave academia after a PhD and that is not considered failure. Yet at the same time they do a bad job of preparing others for academic research.
- staunton 4y ago
  > If you think what I'm proposing is three lectures on philosophy of science than either you have zero idea how a PhD program works or you're arguing in bad faith. Talking about three lectures was meant as a question of what you actually propose (you might say that's bad faith). However, I believe you will find many people who you can convince that this is an important problem and they will suggest the "lecture approach" in full seriousness. That's also what I would expect from administrators who can actually implement some change in response to the problem. You still haven't said what measures you would actually endorse. I will try to guess a second time: Do you want to make each PhD student design their own experiment, perhaps with individual hands-off supervision to teach methodology? Either these experiments will be "toy experiments" to teach them methodology, or they would have to make a real contribution to science, in which case you would have to massively increase research budgets (or massively reduce numbers of PhD students) and add a LOT of non-PhD student researchers who do all the work for your newly made PhD-PI. In the latter case, these experiments might not actually deliver on their promise of generating much knowledge and, I believe, would prove an investment in the PhD's education at the cost of less scientific output. You will not convince administrators making economic decisions to implement either of these, even if they agree with you about the urgency of the problem. I think it's quite instructive to think about why this is so. Which brings me back to my main claim: the important problem in modern science is the incentive structure, not the lack of scientific methodology knowledge in PhD students.
  - Loquebantur 4y ago
    You are right about the incentive structure being a main problem in science. But at the heart of the reasons why this structure is the way it is, you find people's utter lack of knowledge about how science does and should work in the first place. Remarably, nearly all the commenters here betray this very lack of knowledge by talking about it as "philosophy". As if it was some practically irrelevant jibberjabber. Science does not work by magic though, with people going through some motions of an occult ritual. It's an algorithm, implemented insanely badly currently.
    - 4y ago

caddemon 4y ago

No as fields get deeper and deeper there is a point at which it is no longer humanly possible to cover the prior material exhaustively in a vaguely reasonable timeframe. We can keep digging narrower and narrower niches at the expense of basic scientific literacy, or we can realize that at some point the system cannot keep scaling in a one dimensional way. Or I guess we can make people go to school until they're 60. If you think what I'm proposing is three lectures on philosophy of science than either you have zero idea how a PhD program works or you're arguing in bad faith. The fact that someone can graduate from a top 5 biology PhD program without ever demonstrating the ability to come up with a decent research question nor to independently plan a decent study to address a given research question is appalling. The fact the programs actively discourage students from exploring anything intellectual outside of the narrow framework of their chosen lab, even projects that would clearly fit under the program's broader umbrella, is also appalling. The primary point isn't whether students can learn those things on their own later. The primary point is that this is a huge indictment of the culture of graduate training. It is creating a legion of fucking drones as our next set of profs. Many of them are truly not aware that they lack this expertise. Also, a PhD is explicitly designed as training to be in academia. There are a small set of industry jobs that require a PhD, and there are more industry jobs that appreciate a PhD, but really the only reason that PhDs have shifted so much towards industry is because the academic job market is completely fucked. It is only recently that biology professors will entertain the idea that someone should choose to leave academia after a PhD and that is not considered failure. Yet at the same time they do a bad job of preparing others for academic research.

staunton 4y ago
> If you think what I'm proposing is three lectures on philosophy of science than either you have zero idea how a PhD program works or you're arguing in bad faith. Talking about three lectures was meant as a question of what you actually propose (you might say that's bad faith). However, I believe you will find many people who you can convince that this is an important problem and they will suggest the "lecture approach" in full seriousness. That's also what I would expect from administrators who can actually implement some change in response to the problem. You still haven't said what measures you would actually endorse. I will try to guess a second time: Do you want to make each PhD student design their own experiment, perhaps with individual hands-off supervision to teach methodology? Either these experiments will be "toy experiments" to teach them methodology, or they would have to make a real contribution to science, in which case you would have to massively increase research budgets (or massively reduce numbers of PhD students) and add a LOT of non-PhD student researchers who do all the work for your newly made PhD-PI. In the latter case, these experiments might not actually deliver on their promise of generating much knowledge and, I believe, would prove an investment in the PhD's education at the cost of less scientific output. You will not convince administrators making economic decisions to implement either of these, even if they agree with you about the urgency of the problem. I think it's quite instructive to think about why this is so. Which brings me back to my main claim: the important problem in modern science is the incentive structure, not the lack of scientific methodology knowledge in PhD students.
- Loquebantur 4y ago
  You are right about the incentive structure being a main problem in science. But at the heart of the reasons why this structure is the way it is, you find people's utter lack of knowledge about how science does and should work in the first place. Remarably, nearly all the commenters here betray this very lack of knowledge by talking about it as "philosophy". As if it was some practically irrelevant jibberjabber. Science does not work by magic though, with people going through some motions of an occult ritual. It's an algorithm, implemented insanely badly currently.
  - 4y ago